A chronicle of the development of GONE GITMO, a virtual installation of Guantanamo Bay Prison in Second Life. GONE GITMO is a collaboration between Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil.

Machinima Report

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Trapped!

The next morning at BAVC, Nonny signs on to Second Life. She’s set up her account to enter Second Life where she last signed off and she last signed off from inside a cage. In the meantime, Ben has begun work again on the site and sealed up all of the cages. When she signs on, she is trapped! Although rationally she knows it’s virtual, she’s more than virtually frantic trying to get out and, once again, we get a sense of what this experience might offer.

(posted by ndlp)I log onto Second Life to learn that Ben has finished the Camp X-Ray cage – and I am trapped inside! Ben had no way of knowing that I had logged off while still standing inside the cage. The software just put me back where I had last been, except now I am looked in and I don’t know how to get out.

Ben, our builder, had been up late working on the project and is nowhere to be found. When at last he shows up, we have the inevitable discussion about how real and unreal the whole thing is. How “I” felt imprisoned. How such feelings were nonsense especially given the truth of the prison. But it was effective – and maybe it can work as a teaching tool and help raise awareness about it what means to lose habeas corpus rights.

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Acknowledgments

GONE GITMO was developed at a MacArthur sponsored residency at BAVC New Media Producers Institute in 2007.Thanks to our early supporters: Joi Ito, Ben Batstone-Cunningham, and Steve Anderson and Holly Willis of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC School of Cinemtatic Arts. Acknowledgements also to the Annenberg School of Communicatios: Professor Douglas Thomas, Tori Horton, Evonne Heyning. Also Frank Fox, Cinco Pizzocato and Matthew Lee, Bernard Drax.